We've been patient. Too patient. Paul, I'm sure I speak for many when I say we hope you're ok, that things are going good. If not, we hope things take a turn for the better. But for whatever reason, this game has come to a standstill. We love VR Sportfishing, we'd like to see it continue. Don't we deserve some sort of explanation?

I second that. It's sooooo close to being the 'perfect' fishing simulator. I want to play it again, but cannot deal with the physics issues and other things that ruin the gameplay. I've submitted a detailed report of VRSF glitches and requests to Paul. Haven't heard anything in many months now. Is the development still in progress? If not, please make it open source - contributions from the open-source community would allow for very fast development and enhancements. Either way, we'd all like to know what's going on. Thanks.

Fisherman wrote:We've been patient. Too patient. Paul, I'm sure I speak for many when I say we hope you're ok, that things are going good. If not, we hope things take a turn for the better. But for whatever reason, this game has come to a standstill. We love VR Sportfishing, we'd like to see it continue. Don't we deserve some sort of explanation?

I totally agree. Its been a long long looong time since I posted on here and the reason I left was because the forum was dead. Well now I'm back to see if we can breathe some life into this forum.

gonefishin wrote:Is the development still in progress? If not, please make it open source - contributions from the open-source community would allow for very fast development and enhancements

YES!... I don't know of any game that didn't benefit from going open source, there's plenty of us to to work on this and make it into the best fishing game the worlds ever seen.

We hope to hear from you soon Paul.

Last edited by 71__cuda on Thu May 24, 2012 2:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

geraldo, I'm glad you have invested time and effort into VR Sportfishing. I myself was one of the original Beta testers for the game, which I first discovered on youtube. I quickly got onboard due to the game's potential and because of Paul himself, who impressed me as a fellow fisherman and a creative individual. My topic here is about exactly what is wrong with VR Sportfishing and this forum in particular. Without continued input from Paul, it is a dead-end, and no matter what is wrong, and there is no one here who wishes Paul any misfortune, the game, and our hopes for it go nowhere without him. I like the idea of the open-end aspect, but again, without some word from Paul himself, none of it will ever happen. As for patience, this is exactly what that has gotten us for the last 3 months, a lot of nothing. I encourage all players of VR Sportfishing to keep this forum, and the game, alive. Let's hear from everyone!!! (And hopefully, you, Paul).

I've actually been in contact with him recently and I'm happy to report he's not dead. He's just had to shift his priorities in a major way. I'm probably not at liberty to share what he's been up to but he's made a major breakthrough that he seems very excited about (and understandably so) and I wish him the best.

Unfortunately for us, it's not directly related to this project.

I also hope he comes back soon and either cleans up the game or makes it open source so others can work on it if he can't.

First let me say I'm sorry I haven't been keeping people on the forum informed. Here's my honest and thorough explanation of where I'm at and where I see things going:

My time lately has been mostly divided between development and updates of my smartphone app "My Fishing Advisor" and some contract programming. The app has been my main focus as it has been growing rapidly, getting very strong reviews and showing good potential to go much further. It's a free app and the highest rated fishing utility app. It's been out for just over a year for Android, and just a few months for iPhone, and between the two it's been downloaded nearly 400,000 times and generated about 1.8 million customized fishing plans. I've partnered with the North American Fishing Club to help improve and promote the app, and the plan is to work with fishing tackle brands so the app can match the right lure or other product to the fishing scenario. The app got its first name brand sponsorship this month and so far that appears to be working very well.

As for the idea of making VRS open source, I'll say upfront that it's not an option. While I'd love to see what people might do with it, the game relies on a considerable amount of code that I use in other products, including the system for predicting how fish will behave in response to water temperature, light level, weather, water clarity, etc., etc., which is at the core of the smartphone app.

It's always been my intention to do more with VR Sportfishing, and it's still my intention to make some more updates. I thought I'd have more of that done by now, but my work on all 3 Pishtech games has had to take a back seat to other work. I'll certainly admit that VRS is the game that would benefit the most from a major update, mostly because it's by far the most ambitious and complicated of the three. In the past I've made a lot of updates in response to user requests, and I know that's why my games have the loyal fans that they do. But in addition to improvements for the benefit of current users, I also have to be pragmatic and ask myself how many sales such an update might generate, and how much time that update will take.

Meanwhile I'm discouraged by the fact that the two specialized hardware devices supported by the game are now history. The Stix controller is no longer available, and while you could probably find one somewhere, the driver installation uses the company's web site, and that's gone. Thus if you don't already have the drivers installed on your computer or if you've had to reinstall your operating system as I have, a Stix controller is now a paperweight. As for the VR in VR Sportfishing, the Vuzix VR 920 display has been discontinued. I'd hoped to see stereoscopic head tracking displays continue to get better and cheaper or I wouldn't have put the effort into to supporting a $400 headworn display. Vuzix is still around and makes some cool 3D displays around the same price, but as far as I can tell if you want head tracking for a real VR experience, you're looking at well over $1k.

I've recently spent some time trying to debug a graphics issue in VRS. I bought a new latop with a powerful dedicated video card in part so I could have a mobile platform to continue VRS work and as soon as I installed the game I hit a serious snag. If the water effects are set to high I see a nice reflection, but nothing underwater shows up, except the bottom. It's as though the water is infinitely clear and all the fish and vegetation are invisible. After a couple days of research I concluded that it's a bug either in the 3D engine the game uses which hasn't been updated in several years, or in DirectX which the engine uses under the hood, or a glitch in the device driver for this video card. I haven't heard from anybody else having this problem, but it may become more common as people get new computers. At the moment the only solution appears to be to take out the reflection/refraction effect (I've been researching some possible alternatives) or replace the whole 3D engine. If so that would mean practically starting over. For now my fingers are crossed as I hope that a device driver update or DirectX update comes along that clears this up, and that it remains extremely uncommon in the meantime.

VRS as it is today is the product of several thousand hours of development work, and the total number of sales is in the hundreds. When I think of the things I really want to see in this game the list gets pretty big pretty fast: salmon, sturgeon, more trout, more panfish, an upgrade of the scenery in every location, a custom shader for water animations for those with integrated graphics systems, on-line multiplayer tournaments, practical trolling, etc.. It looks like at least another 1,000 hours to get there. If the result was such an improvement that it doubled the rate of sales of this game, looking at the potential income for the hours spent to make it, I'd make a better living delivering pizzas. I didn't start creating fishing games for the money but for the love of it. But I also need to be able to pay the bills. That said, I plan to keep making some improvements, but those updates will not be as frequent nor as ambitious as I wish they could be, and for that I am sorry. I hold out hope that another project (possibly the current app) will be sufficiently successful as to give me the freedom to spend more time on the game development that I'd like to do.

Anyways, it was a short but fun experience. Just like the boat I sank thousands of dollars into - just to use it only a few times and sell it for a loss. With all the overfishing, over-regulation, pollution, rising license fees, and so forth, it's a sad time for any dedicated fisherman to be living in. With the 3D processing technology we have available, one would think there would be a realistic fishing simulator available. Time to hit the books, time to learn the code...